The power of positive thinking: it's one of the things that FDR's wife Eleanor credits with his many successes.
But there's a time for positive thinking and there's a time for righteous anger, and on December 7th, 1941, the time for upbeat energy and happy self-affirmations had passed.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mr. Charismatic-Flexible-Confident-Gregarious Guy, was angry. No, scratch that. He wasn't angry, he was infuriated. (And this fury is well telegraphed in the Pearl Harbor Address.)
His beloved country had been attacked, without provocation and without warning, while he was just hanging out in the White House thinking that the Japanese aggressors and the U.S. had been on the road to improving relations. Boy, was he wrong.
According to experts, anger is usually a byproduct of at least one other emotion. It's not hard to figure out what those emotions might have been in this instance: fear, shock, disbelief, betrayal…
The list goes on.
Roosevelt may have been right that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," but on that fateful day in December, Americans had plenty of things to be mad about.
Questions About Indignation
- Why did Roosevelt wait until December 8th to deliver this speech when the attack on Pearl Harbor happened on December 7th?
- How did America's allies respond to the attack? How did its non-allies respond?
- How does this speech compare to President George W. Bush's speech after 9/11?
- If you were POTUS when Pearl Harbor was attacked, what would you have said and done? Why?
Chew on This
FDR's outrage was totally justified; Japan had no call to be bombing the U.S. like that.
FDR should have been a little more compassionate and understanding of Japan's position; maybe if the U.S. had tried that from the beginning, Japan wouldn't have felt compelled to attack Pearl Harbor.